The T-bones Of T. Rex

Museum Is Hoping That Visitors See Show As Nothing Short Of Dino-mite.

January 8, 1997|By LORI CROUCH Staff Writer

WEST PALM BEACH - — In the heart of Dreher Park, behind Dreher Park Zoo, passers-by will hear a scary growling and rumbling during the next three months.

It won't be a new Jurassic Park, but it will be the South Florida Science Museum's new Dinosaurs Outdoors exhibit, which opens on Saturday and runs through April 27.

The outdoor exhibit, in what once was a vacant lot between the museum and the zoo, will feature 16 dinosaurs - full-sized and half-sized.

Included in the exhibit will be the mighty king of the dinosaurs - a full-sized, 22-foot, 3-ton Tyrannosaurus rex.

"We've always wanted to use that land," museum spokeswoman Sue Bailey said. "Now that we have the facility built, it's plenty big enough, so we can have concerts or special events, put up tents. It will be a nice capital improvement for our museum."

The Dinamation exhibit cost the museum $250,000, and the museum must give a percentage of the proceeds to the California-based Dinamation Co.

But museum officials have high hopes that the huge exhibit will be popular and make the museum money through increased attendance.

"We think this will attract a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise come," Bailey said. "We also hope it will draw from other counties."

The admission cost for the dinosaur exhibit will be separate from the museum. People can attend the exhibit without visiting the museum, which will offer an indoor paleontology exhibit featuring dinosaur bones. The museum will remain open until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays during the run of the dinosaur exhibit.

Each child visiting the exhibit will receive a dinosaur cutout and coloring book.

There also will be a planetarium show on the death of dinosaurs, exploring the theory that a giant meteor that hit the Gulf of Mexico around the Yucatan peninsula rendered them extinct.

Most of the dinosaurs, animated through compressed air, are much smaller than the tyrannosaur. The next largest, at 20 feet long, is a triceratops lying on its side. Some of the dinosaurs are half-sized - adolescents instead of adults, Bailey said.

And the fearsome velociraptor, the villain in Jurassic Park, is shown at its normal scale, not the size in the movie. That means it's about 4 feet tall instead of 8, she said.

"We all think the dinosaurs were huge, but only 5 percent were very, very large," Bailey said. "Most of them were the size of horses and dogs."